Truth be told, exit interviews useful

Barbara RoseCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Career coaches are fond of reminding us that the way we leave organizations is as important as the way we come in.

Never burn bridges, they warn, no matter how much you want the last word. Squelch those self-righteous impulses for vindication and practice declaring sweetly, "Their offer was simply too good to refuse."

After all, you're leaving. None of it is your problem anymore.

"If people don't care enough to stay, why would they care enough to tell you what's wrong?" said Cynthia Fukami, management professor at University of Denver's Daniels College of Business.

Yet a surprisingly large number do. Some care about the people they're leaving behind; others care about having their voices heard in that moment when they feel as if they have the upper hand because they're leaving on their own terms.

They describe dueling impulses. They are happy to be out the door, but not quite ready to move on. Not yet. They want their due.

Workers are far more likely to tell the truth in exit interviews than in employee satisfaction surveys, according to Nobscot Corp., a software firm that helps companies manage exit interviews. Seventy-one percent said they were "likely" or "very likely" to be honest in online exit interviews compared with 48 percent in satisfaction surveys.

When given the chance to remain anonymous in their online exit interview, about two-thirds choose to identify themselves, says Nobscot Chief Executive and President Beth Carvin.

"That percentage has held steady for the eight years we've been doing this," she said. "What we've determined is, there's a desire to say, 'This is who I am, this is what I want to tell you, and now I'm leaving.' It's like a closure thing. They're begging to be heard, even though one foot is out the door."

Jessica Nelson, marketing manager at Webquest Inc. in Agoura Hills, Calif., prepares for exit debriefings as earnestly she does for any other important interview.

"I think it's that one time you have, that you rarely get, when if you're very careful about it, you can let the interviewer know some things that would benefit everybody else," she said. "It's your opportunity to take care of those people, and you wouldn't get that if you were still at the company. You'd just be one of them."

But this is not a time to spill your guts, she adds. "You have to be constructive and non-emotional. That's one mistake I think some people make because you're not as nervous [as when applying for the job], so you might be more apt to share things."

Like what? "Anything that pertained specifically to an individual, their work style, especially if [the person] was a leader, I definitely kept my mouth shut."

"I still had very warm feelings for Sears, but I was very frustrated working there," said O'Hara, executive director of the Illinois Venture Capital Association. "I had both those feelings when I was going through the interview. [I felt like saying,] 'I want to tell you things that will explain why it's so hard for people to work here.'"

And she did. "What I said was, 'It's very hard to get decisions made here. I think it's because there's a very, very high cost to being wrong and not a lot of benefit to being right."

She could have said more, a lot more, but she stopped short of talking about the incident that sent her out the door.

"You don't want people to see you as someone who has an ax to grind. That's not the way you want people to remember you, whining and complaining," she said.

Some employers try to circumvent such feelings by hiring a third party to conduct the interviews or by moving the process online.

"You'd be surprised what people will type," said Nobscot's Carvin. "One that sticks with me, it was a hospital that wanted to know why a lot of people were leaving their pharmacy. The exit-interview feedback started saying they felt they weren't getting enough training. Two different people said, 'I was afraid I was going to kill someone, so I had to leave.'"

She recalls an insurance company where executives wanted to know the reasons for a department's high turnover rate. Their hunch was, it was related to the manager's very strong personality. But as the exit interviews came in, "they saw a surprising thing," Carvin said. "The organization, a couple years earlier, had stopped training. That was really important career development for the people in that department. It turned out people were leaving because those classes were unavailable."

"[Exit interviewing] is really about getting rid of assumptions and identifying the real issues," she adds.

Ernie Matia recalls his exit debriefing from a job he describes as "like what I imagine building the pyramids was like."

"They start with a truckload of slaves. Everybody works 60- or 70-hour weeks; some they use up," the database manager recalls wryly. "I thought it was nice they actually had exit interviews because of the sheer numbers. Every week, three or four would leave."

When his interviewer asked, "Why did you start looking for another job?" he was honest, to a point.

"There are degrees of honesty," he said. "When you start getting into politics, that's the sort of thing you keep to yourself. It's one thing to say they could improve on something. It's another to say that the whole project was, at the very start, monitored and managed in a non-productive way."

Matia likes to end such interviews with a question of his own. "I'd always ask if they had heard anything about me that I could improve on."

The typical response: "We don't really have that information. All I have here is that you're leaving."